Meet the pros

Maggie tipped me off to a This American Life episode that got re-run last month called Meet the Pros. The middle act chronicles Ira Glass's trip to the World Series of Poker in 2001.

As the episode originally aired in 2001, you get a view of poker that is only 6 years old but is from a completely different era. In 2001, amateur Chris Moneymaker hadn't yet won the WSOP which subsequently encouraged the masses to give poker a try (there were 10 times as many entrants in this year's WSOP as in 2001). And the World Poker Tour and its hole card cam hadn't yet debuted on TV.

This is a glimpse back at poker right on the cusp of its big break.

The story chronicles how Ira Glass gets swept up in the action and has to come to terms with his own poker jones. There's a wide-eyedness to his commentary that I find really endearing. In reviewing the rules of hold'em, Glass mentions that the five community cards are there "for everybody to share." The drawn-out way he says "share" makes it seem like he's talking about kindergarteners with a box of crayons.

Glass also has some great interviews with pros Jennifer Harman, Phil Gordon, Paul Phillips, Rafe Hurst and Mike Laing (this is around the time that Mike was flipping quarters for $25,000 with Andy Beal, as mentioned in The Professor, The Banker and the Suicide King.)

As this is before pro poker players became quasi-celebrities, you get a less mediated, less polished account of what it's like to be a pro (I also think Glass does a great job of drawing his subjects out). Jennifer Harman talks about how she couldn't sleep for days after she first lost $30,000 in a session. Mike Laing talks about how he hopes his son doesn't become a pro. And, Phil Gordon reveals that he lost his wife because he didn't want to give up his life of gambling adventure.

I'd resisted the pull of This American Life for many years ... really without a good reason for doing so. But I've come around because of stuff like this and the unparalleled Break-Up episode. (Starlee Kine, who is the star of the Break-Up show, has a supporting role in Glass's story about poker).

Completist

Control is one of two Joy Division movies The Weinstein Company snapped up during this year's festival season. The other is a documentary called Joy Division.

I guess they wanted to corner the market. Either that or it proves that there's no such thing as a casual Joy Division fan and one of them works for Bob and Harvey Weinstein.

Run it twice

I've watched a lot of televised poker and most of it is not very good.

Almost every show either contrives or covers a tournament. The tournament format would seem to be a good choice because it has a built-in conclusion; a single winner. And the escalating blinds make for ever-increasing pot sizes.

But those million dollar pots are made up of tournament chips, not real dollars. So even though there's big prize money at stake, a player only loses his original buy-in if he busts out (and sometimes this is as small as a couple hundred bucks thanks to smaller, qualifying tournaments).

The Game Show Network's High Stakes Poker is now in its fourth season and takes a different approach. They televise a cash game; no-limit hold'em with $300/$600 blinds and $100 antes. The minimum buy-in for the game is $100,000 and the money is real.

Seeing players compete over six figure pots is part of the fun. Because it's a cash game, it also means that the producers can invite the best players. In tournaments, especially large ones, you usually end up with half a table of marginally skilled nobodies. GSN pays the best around to show up for their game. (The appearance fee of $1250/hour is a sweetener but not enough to significantly offset the large stakes).

Also, you get to see a lot of things that would never happen in a tournament. All-in bets are far less common in deep stack cash games. And when they happen, the players will often "run it twice" meaning that they'll deal out the remaining cards two times. The effect is to mitigate the variance on these big bet pots and it's interesting to see stuff like this get worked out.

You also get a sense of how addicted to action these pro players are. They will gamble on everything. They bet on what cards will come out on the flop, they bet on how much weight someone will gain in a lifetime. There was nearly a $500,000 bet about whether someone could work 40 hours a week in a furniture store for a year.

High Stakes also does a great job on the commentary. Most poker shows have amazingly bad voice-over filled with faux-folksy poker nonsense. But Gabe Kaplan is savvy enough to work out the players' thought process and is funny enough to beat-up goomba co-host AJ Benza.

There's really only two things bad about the show. The first is that you have to have GSN to watch it (I don't). You can download it off of Veoh (skip season 1, they didn't quite have it together yet) but it's not a great experience. If only they would sell the episodes online.

The other thing is the High Stakes Poker theme song. It may be the worst poker song ever written and this is not a particularly distinguished genre. A sample of the lyrics:

Man I'm gonna kick it / Pocket nines is the ticket
Ladies ain't ladies / unless they your ladies
Get your hand on a monster / if that's what it takes
And if you got what it takes / You can play High Stakes.

Despite that, I recommend it.

Cat photos

Lane has done a great job cultivating a yard cat that hangs around her house down in New Zealand. It's fun to have a kitten around.

I inherited a mistrust of cats from my mom. But all-star felines like this one and Moki have changed my mind.

I no longer believe cats are evil. Some may be duplicitous.

Index

• Percentage of Americans who believe the Constitution establishes a Christian nation: 55%


• Number of times "God" "Jesus" "Christ" or "Christian" are mentioned in the Constitution: 0


• Number of times "religion" or "religious" are mentioned in the Constitution: 2


• Percentage of those references constituting limits on Congressional power: 100%

The first statistic comes from a survey from the First Amendment Center. The 55% is the sum of "Strongly agree" (38%) and "Mildly agree" (17%) for the question "The US Constitution establishes a Christian nation." While the 1000 person phone survey is conducted every year, there's unfortunately not historical data for this question.

The other three statistics come from doing a control-F on the text of the US Constitution ... which apparently 55% of Americans should read.

Returned

I'm back from New Zealand and have many pictures and tales I would like to share. But I'm not ready. They're still brewing inside.

Lane Collins, photographrix extraordinaire, posted some of hers. Her Milford Sound photos are approximately 218.3% better than mine.

You can also see me strolling away after having successfully dipped an entire glacier into my cup of tea.

In doing so, I fared a damn site better in my geologic ambitions than Sutter did when he tried to skip a rock up to the top of a mountain. Silly boy.

Only for now

I saw the Vegas production of Avenue Q with Eric Case this week. As Case attests, I enjoyed myself very much.

A raunchy, puppet musical may be the ideal form of entertainment for San Francisco. And compared to when I saw Avenue Q in Vegas, the show was definitely raunched up a bit for the SF crowd.

In Vegas, there were a number of walkouts during the intermission. But for San Francisco they both increased the athleticism of the muppet sex scene and played up the gay jokes. The crowd loved it.

At its heart, the musical works as yet another recontextualization of childhood nostalgia. While this is well-trod territory, it's also very funny. But there are also a couple of genuine, unironic moments in the musical that make Avenue Q much more interesting than something like Robot Chicken.

The final number, with its dharma of "Only for now" is about as good a way to end a coming-of-age musical as you're likely to find. Also, I think the song "I wish I could go back to college" is a great number. For one thing, it hass one of my favorite jokes of the show: "I wish I could just drop a class / or get into a play / or change my major / or fuck my TA."

But it's also got a line from the main character Princeton who sings, almost as an aside, "I wish I had taken more pictures." When I saw the show on Wednesday, laughed at this line; they'd been laughing at everything. But as it sunk in, it seemed like everyone realized a little too late that it wasn't really a joke. Not a bad trick for a puppet show.

Fantasy

e^(-π * √-number of horns on a unicorn) + the answer to life the universe and everything = 41

War debts

Anna sent me Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942, a handbook with advice for GIs on how to get along with the British.

I love the matter-of-fact way it's written. And they did a great job reprinting it to match the style of the time.

Plus, it's got tons of great material to read in a 40s-era newscaster voice.


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The market has not solved

On Saturday, I went to a birthday party where we played a little PS2 Karaoke. I wowed the crowd with my rendition of Friday I'm in Love. And that song has been stuck in my head since Sunday morning.

At first, it was pleasant enough. But it's starting to get annoying. For me, the solution is usually just to listen to the song obsessively until my brain releases it from bondage. But, to my shame, I don't own Friday I'm in Love. In fact I don't own a single album by The Cure.

Now this requires some explanation. I like The Cure. Singing along to Just Like Heaven was as essential to high school as hanging out at Denny's. And I had a great time seeing them live at Radio City Music Hall in 1996.

But at some point I decided that I shouldn't own any of their albums. There's no good reason behind my stubbornness. I may have decided that this privation was necessary to show my loyalty to New Order. My adolescence had a number of overwrought pop culture-induced anxieties.

Anyway, I'm ready to make up for lost time. Crystal has the Best of album shared over iTunes here at Twitter HQ (and Blaine is sitting on the completely discography). But I'd really like to pick up my own DRM-free, high quality version of Kiss Me.

Yet, Internet fails me. I can't just go download that legally. The best I can do is pick up the lullaby version of The Cure from Audio Lunchbox.

Which I have now done.

I'm trying to give you my money, big media. But all I get for my efforts is the Fisher-Price Friday I'm in Love.